The 1977 album Roger Waters thought Pink Floyd couldn’t make: “They’ll never be as good as mine”
The allure of Pink Floyd was always about more than whatever Roger Waters was thinking at that exact moment.
Even though he might have been the scribe of some of their greatest tunes back in the day, the fact that he wrote some of their tunes didn’t mean that he somehow had the right to use the name for anything and everything that they did every time he performed. It was all about them all working in unison to create something magical, but when they hit their stride, there were many songs that Waters was convinced that no one else could have written apart from him.
Then again, it’s not like the rest of the band was going to argue that fact whenever Waters wrote his words. He was clearly looking to go in different directions after ‘Echoes’, and even if David Gilmour would contribute the odd song to The Wall, it was all about them providing the greatest backing tracks that they could for his lyrics. Wish You Were Here was a statement from Waters to Syd Barrett, but you’re missing a crucial part of their sound if you neglect to see what Richard Wright and Gilmour are doing.
They are colouring the sound in the perfect way every time they set up their instruments, and no matter how much Waters wants to admit that he opened up a new world of possibilities, it’s hard to see his version of The Dark Side of the Moon as one grey gelatinous husk of their earlier masterpiece. That might have been the last time that Waters was happy with one of their records, but that’s only because he didn’t see records like Animals as band projects.
He was putting together all of the ideas for the record, and even if Gilmour had the initial chords and melodies to ‘Dogs’ and ‘Sheep’, Waters was the one turning them into outright classics. His critique of capitalism was one of the most audacious concepts he had ever come up with, and even when looking through all of their later records, Waters was convinced that the band weren’t capable of making an album like that.
This was the sound of him getting more cynical about the business, and it’s not like he saw the rest of the band stepping up to the plate to help him, saying, “There wasn’t any room for anyone else to be writing. If there were chord sequences there, I would always use them. There was no point in Gilmour, Mason or Wright trying to write lyrics. They’ll never be as good as mine.” That’s pretty brutal, yes, but when you look at what the band did after he left, it’s not like he didn’t have a small point.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason sounds like someone trying to play it safe, but could you really blame Gilmour at that point? He was trying his best to make an album while he was being sued by Waters over the use of the name, but when The Division Bell came out, the lyrics didn’t improve a lot more when you look at all of the dissolution going on between him and Waters.
A lot of the themes of the record were all about miscommunication, and since Waters wasn’t willing to listen to what his friends had to say, the fact that he held onto his beliefs so much is part of what made the album work. He was too headstrong to see what he was doing, and there was only so much patience that Gilmour had before he was ready to move on to the next phase of his life.
They may have been comrades in arms trying to make their final records, but even if Animals had a lot more going for it than the average thinking man’s prog record, Waters wasn’t trying to brag when talking about the record. He was convinced that nothing his old band did would measure up to him, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t going to try to leave him in the dust after a while.
